Gender and Cultural Differences in the classroom

Thanks for a great meeting last week! We had a very lively discussion about, well, discussions. There was interest in pursuing gender and cultural differences, highlighted by Chapters 7 and 8, for the next couple of months, and one book that was discussed in the Brookfield and Preskill book was Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. Even though it's not directly about pedagogy, we thought it would be useful to understand the differences in discourse as a way to understand discussion dynamics. This book is widely available in local libraries as well as at Stanford library. Another book that was discussed was Maher and Tetreault's "The Feminist Classroom" which was mentioned a few times in our previous book and is also available in the Stanford library. I know some people had already read the Tannen book, so how about for our January meeting, we'll discuss both, and each of us can pick which book to read.

I forgot to include the link to that blog post that I mentioned at our meeting last week about a British professor's "tips" on surviving academia. Here it is.

Our meeting will be on the first Thursday of the quarter, January 10 at 8am. I'll confirm location by e-mail closer to the date, but I'm pretty sure we'll be at A3C (Old Union Ballroom) again.

Have a great holiday break!

socratic questions website/december book

Mariatte emailed me the following link on Deep Learning, which includes plenty of information such as a taxonomy of Socratic questions and how to give feedback to students regarding their questions/critical thinking, among other topics. It's a great follow-up to our last book!

Speaking of books, last week I-Chant emailed the DL regarding December's book: "Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms" by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. If you're going to the next meeting (Thursday, December 6) and want a copy of the book, please email I-Chant if you haven't done so already!

november meeting summary & info for december meeting

Yesterday we met to discuss William W. Wilen's "Questions, Questioning Techniques, and Effective Teaching". We found this book to be highly informative and it was also a nice change of pace from our previous lecture-driven and teacher portrait-driven readings. We touched on several topics including wait time, building the skill of developing/formulating questions, and the different types of questions that we can ask of our students. A lot of our discussion focused on the distinctions between question categories, such as high-convergent vs. low-convergent as well as the corresponding divergent question types. It was enlightening to us to read about these distinctions because we hadn't really thought of them before -- this also led into a side discussion on Bloom's taxonomy and developing questions for Personal Response Systems (aka clickers) for large lecture courses.

The art of asking questions is something that we all need to develop, particularly in the realm of preparing questions ahead of time to probe students' understanding and to achieve the intended level of thinking for which we aim.

From the students' side, we discussed how to help students generate their own questions, but we wanted to have a more in-depth look at how to deal with/react to questions that students ask of us. We touched on the issues of praise and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation as being important things to consider when determining how to encourage and shape students' lines of questioning.

For our next meeting in December, we want to continue on with reading about asking questions and the many subleties involved, from both the students' and the instructors' sides. Right now the next book is TBA, but we're hoping to find another book that's accessible online. Angela also brought up a great suggestion -- we should all bring in questions (e.g. from discussion activities) that we've used in our own classes so that we can share them with one another and discuss these as well. That would be an excellent way of bringing in what we read and merging it with what we hope to practice in our own classes.

Our December meeting will be held on Thursday, December 6 from 8:00-9:30am at the Asian American Activities Center top floor couch room. Once we determine the next book, we'll let everyone know what it is and how to access it.

Asking questions

Thanks for a good meeting yesterday everyone! Even though most of us may not follow in the footsteps of the Masters in being mean, crotchety professors, I think many of us enjoyed reading the book.

For our next meeting, we discussed focusing in on discussion-leading, the Socratic method, and less emphasis on lectures, which has dominated a lot of our recent readings. I was able to find an interesting book (complete text available online, hooray!) that may be good for our interests. It is William W. Wilen's Questions, Questioning Techniques, and Effective Teaching, and we can access it here. I believe the library also has a hard copy if you don't prefer to read online.

There was also a preference to return to meeting over breakfast to invigorate the start of our day! Let's plan to meet on Thursday, November 8, at 8am, back in our usual space, Asian American Activities Center, top floor couch room (not the conference room we met in for the October meeting but just upstairs from that).

See everyone in November!

First meeting of 2007-2008 Academic Year!

We have an update for our October meeting. It will be held on Thursday, October 4th at 5pm in the conference room of the Asian American Activities Center which is in the South Wing of Old Union, known as the Old Union Clubhouse. Directions and map are located here. We will be discussing Joseph Epstein's "Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers." CTL has agreed to purchase a few used copies of this hard to find book for us which should arrive next week. Please stop by the main desk next week to check out a copy.

In the meantime, please spread the word to your friends about our meeting!

june meeting summary & july meeting schedule

This morning we met to continue our discussion of "McKeachie's Teaching Tips". We touched on topics of cultural sensitivity in relation to classroom discussion; teaching thinking/strategic learning; and teaching ethics/values.

Our most in-depth discussion was about teaching values, particularly in the way instructors are or aren't aware that they're conveying a certain viewpoint on their area of speciality when teaching their courses. What should students take away -- the truths of the instructor, or that this might be one version of the truth? How does or doesn't this mesh with course goals? This is especially relevant to those of us as researchers and instructors, since in some fields we teach students about classic theories that may have fallen out of favor today.

Robyn brought up Perry's work on developmental pathways of learning, which McKeachie mentions briefly in the chapter on "Dealing With Student Problems and Problem Students" (see the section "Students Who Want the Truth and Students Who Believe that Everything Is Relative"). We discussed this in relation to teaching students at the advanced high school or early college stage and how to help them along this pathway of learning. Some suggestions that were brought up: talk about an historical example of an idea change (although the relevance of this to the course topics should be made clear to the students, rather than having it be nothing more than a timeline of events); and discussing the various paths of thinking that past researchers have gone through in the field -- how/why some paths of thinking fell apart, and how/why others persisted -- to enhance the idea of thinking like a researcher/expert in the field.

Next month, we'll be meeting on Monday, July 9 at 12:00pm (location TBD). We'll be reading Beard & Wilson's "Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and Trainers", a book that we found a couple of months ago (see April 12 post for more info). It's available through Stanford Library's ebrary. We haven't decided which parts we're reading -- it has 12 chapters -- so we can either do like we did with McKeachie's book (read and discuss over 2 meetings) or just have each of us just read the chapters that look interesting to us and then discuss them in the next meeting. Any thoughts?

may meeting summary & info on june meeting

We met bright and early yesterday to discuss Parts 1 and 2 of "McKeachie's Teaching Tips". Overall we found it to be a practical guide with plenty of great ideas and inspirations for our own teaching. We had great discussions on the purpose and utility of lectures; the purpose of discussions; grading and assessment methods; and the honor code with regard to the threat of cheating.

For our June meeting, we decided to continue on with McKeachie's book and leave it open to individual choice on how much of it to read. We'll have plenty to discuss no matter what!

We'll be meeting on Friday, June 1 from 8:00-9:30am (location TBD). Happy reading!

our next book: mckeachie's teaching tips

This morning we met at CTL to go through their book collection and select something for our next meeting. We decided on McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers by Wilbert J. McKeachie and colleagues. This is one of the classic teaching texts, widely considered a must-read for higher education teachers. We'll be reading Parts 1 and 2 for the May meeting, scheduled for Friday, May 11 from 8:00-9:30am (location TBD). We'll play it by ear as far as how much of it we'll read for the June meeting (date TBD).

A couple of us checked out copies of previous editions of the book, since the topics and material seemed to be consistent throughout the publications, but arranged a little bit differently. There's also a reserve copy of the 10th edition available at Cubberley. If a bunch of us are interested in buying the book, we could get a group order going. Drop a comment if you'd like to do so. In the meantime, if you want to browse through it online, parts of the 11th edition are browsable here.

Runner-up book choices included:

-Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development by David A. Kolb

-The Psychology of Teaching Methods edited by N.L. Gage

-Mastering the Techniques of Teaching by Joseph Lowman

-The Elements of Teaching by James M. Banner, Jr. and Harold C. Cannon

We discussed getting into experiential learning as a possible summer meeting topic and found a very convenient online resource through Stanford's ebrary collection. The book Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and Trainers by Colin M. Beard and John P. Wilson is published online in its entirety. (If the link doesn't work, you may have to install the ebrary reader first.) Sarah also mentioned the Association for Experiential Education, which has more resources on this topic.

active learning in lecture courses

I decided to follow up on the idea of making lectures more interactive (Ch. 5 in Bain's book - "How Do They Conduct Class?"). I read through Mazur's Peer Instruction, which is deceptively long, but the majority of the book contains questions for Physics instructors to use for ConcepTests. The ConcepTest is Mazur's way of injecting interactivity into his lecture courses by presenting students with a multiple-choice question, giving them a minute to think about the answer by themselves, and then recording their answers. Then they turn to a classmate to discuss their answers -- Mazur also calls this the convince-your-neighbor approach, since this process is particularly relevant if two students have different answers and/or one student may be more uncertain about an answer than the other. Therefore the uncertain student would be more inclined to change his/her answer. After a short discussion period, students then report their answers again, which may or may not have been revised based on the discussion. Mazur found a significant increase in correct answers after peer instruction, if the original (pre- peer instruction) poll yielded about 35-70% correct answers. He has found that this result extends beyond Harvard students (his own student population), with instructors at high schools, community colleges, and large and small schools all reporting similar results.

The peer discussions are especially helpful in exposing misunderstandings in reasoning, and hearing classmates describe and explain the concepts in their own words -- versus seasoned instructors that may have lost touch with the difficulty of learning a particular concept when teaching it -- seems to make a greater impact in the learning process. Mazur also goes around the classroom to listen in on these discussions, which gives him additional feedback on where students might be tripping up on their conceptual understanding. He uses the repeat-when-necessary approach, i.e. going over material again if there are mostly incorrect answers after the peer instruction period.

Mazur and colleagues have a number of papers on the peer instruction method, including a review of ten years of data using this method. Other papers can be accessed at Mazur Group's website.

The peer instruction method can be implemented into teaching most subjects and integrated with using Personal Response Systems (PRS). Mazur uses a series of mini-presentations within his courses as a lead-in to his ConcepTests. The short lecture format combined with the ConcepTests help to keep students' attention and engage them in the material.

How does this all relate to what Bain discussed? Bain mentioned that getting students to talk in class is key -- not just talking for talking's sake, but productive talking that allows students to engage with ideas and think aloud about what they're trying to learn. He also stated that students seem to learn best when presented with authentic problems of an honorific quality, as opposed to busy work. Overall, instigating discussion within a lecture makes students feel more like active participants in their own learning rather than merely being received knowers.

The Effect of Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation

For next Monday's meeting I delved a little deeper into a section of Chapter 2 of Bain's book. Chapter 2 is titled "What Do We Know About How We Learn?" and the section I pursued a little more is "What Motivates, What Discourages." Specifically I focused on some work by Edward L. Deci on the effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. In Bain's book he discusses a study in which Deci and his colleagues gave the subjects a puzzle to play with and left the room. Some of the subjects received rewards in the form of payment, others did not. What they found is that the people who received rewards quickly lost interest in the puzzle once the rewards stopped whereas those that did not receive rewards continued to be interested. I looked more closely at some of the research regarding rewards and intrinsic motivation and read a meta analysis that Deci et al. wrote in 1999 reviewing nearly 30 years of research in the field. Here is the link to the abstract and you can download the PDF if you want. It's pretty long.
The general idea is that Deci et al. have created a theory they call Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) to predict the effects of rewards on behavior. They find that tangible rewards (money, prizes, etc.) tend to decrease a person's motivation to do an interesting activity. Verbal rewards (positive feedback) in contrast generally tend to increase a person's motivation as long as the feedback is perceived to be informational rather than controlling. They found that verbal feedback which was controlling would also decrease intrinsic motivation. So, essentially if people felt that they were being coerced into doing something, even if they enjoyed doing it initially, they lost interest.

This has profound implications for teaching since evaluation of student work is such a large part of traditional education. Often students do the work to get the grade. My wife, who is a high school teacher, talks about the grade grubbers, students who come weaseling to get a few extra points because they have their sights set on the grade rather than the learning. Although many things are interesting to learn about, very few students would spend time learning them outside of school or assignments. Is this because of the grade based evaluation system? Perhaps. In Ken Bain's book it becomes clear later that many of the best teachers were selected because they inspired interest in their subject which lasted after the students had left their classes. Often, these classes had an atmosphere which was described to be more collaborative, with the professor acting as a facilitator rather than a dictator and the students having significant freedom to decide the course of the class. Evaluation was often left until the end of the term with informational feedback given throughout the course to help students address areas that needed work.
These results seem to mesh fairly well with Deci's theory and it means that to enhance student interest in learning we need to move away from a system which dangles grades as a carrot in front of the students toward a system which supplies meaningful feedback and guidance. I'm sure that this is easier said than done.

Next Meeting This Monday

Hi All, we have conserved the same time and place until now, but it dawned on us that there might be tweaks needed for some people at the begining of each quarter. How does the current time (Monday 5:00pm-6:30pm) and location work for everybody this quarter? Please send us feedback and RSVP as usual so we have a head count.
-ignacio

Timely Article in @Stanford

Most of the folks in the reading group probably noticed this already, but if there is anyone else out there who is looking at the blog and hasn't read Ken Bain's book there was an interesting article in this months issue of @Stanford about psychologist Carol Dweck. Her research on the effect of growth vs. static mind-sets in developing intelligence was cited in Ken Bain's book. In short, her research has shown that people who believe that they can improve are likely to do so whereas people who believe they have an innate fixed ability are less likely to be able to progress. For a very readable description of the story behind this research, check out the link.

I missed it...

... but how did it go? Any new insights on Bain's work?

March Meeting

Our next book is Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do. I love that it's college TEACHERS and not Professors because it lends a different weight. We will be meeting on Monday, March 12, from 5-6:30 and we will be in a temporary location for that meeting, the Women's Community Center which will feature couches that do NOT roll! If you are a new member to the group and would like to purchase this book, please send me an e-mail! There will be at least one copy on reserve at CTL, too.

Happy reading everyone!

Sarah follow-up: Negative results

Hey!
Sarah was talking yesterday about problems with negative results not getting published, and I mentioned that some journals seem to be thinking about the same lines. So, here is one announcement from LinguistList:

For the first time in the field, the leading journal Language Teaching
(CUP) will now include a section of research papers dedicated exclusively
to replication studies. This area of research receives little or no
specific attention in the mainstream journals but needs to play a far more
significant role than it has up to now in our field. In keeping with the
survey characteristics of Language Teaching, we also encourage submissions
of meta-analyses which attempt to combine or synthesise a series of
comparable research replications. More details about this permanent Call
for Papers can be obtained from the Editor at: gporte@gmail.com

Language Teaching website:
http://www.cambridge.org/journals/journal_catalogue.asp?mnemonic=lta

Now, it is not about negative results, but replication is close enough for me. And the word "exclusively" is quite important here. Amy Perfors' had some discussion of the negative results issue on the Harvard Social Science Statistics website last year, but I'm hanged if I can find it in the archive...

Buzz-words and reference material

David mentioned he was interested in learning as well some of the current buzzwords. Apart from providing me with some buzzwords, the following three books served me well when doing practical work in the classroom and are probably standard issue in many programs. It is handy to own them since they are useful, rather cheap and updaded periodically:

Clasroom Assessment Techniques by Thomas Angelo and Pat Cross

Collaborative Learning Techniques by Liz Barley, Pat Cross and Claire Major

and Designing & Assessing Courses and Curricula by Rober Diamond.

They are all from Jossey-Bass(Wiley), they publish most of the cool hands-on reference books. Non-reference books can be a bit lightweight at times, but let me know if you find something interesting.

Another book...

The book I mentioned when we met last time is G. Polya's "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method". Said Polya was Professor of Mathematics at... three guesses? Stanford University.
Part I of the book is called "In the classroom". You may wanna check it out.
Cheers

Possible Inspiration and Calendar

The University of Washington also has a Pedagogy Reading Group for grad. students and I found their webpage. We can definitely take some inspiration from them. Their reading list looks really cool and diverse.

Also, I just looked at the calendar and we can set our future meeting dates as follows:

Monday, February 12, 5-6:30pm
Monday, March 12, 5-6:30pm
Monday, April 9, 5-6:30pm
Monday, May 7, 5-6:30pm

We can always reschedule if a lot of people can't make it, but this will give us a guide to follow.

Next Meeting!

Our next meeting will be on Monday, February 12 from 5-6:30pm in the same location (couch room of A3C). Please spread the word to your friends, and send me any snack requests!!
***Update***: The author of Conceptual Blockbusting, Professor James Adams, has agreed to come to our next meeting!

Our first book is 'Conceptual Blockbusting' by James Adams

So it seems we will be reading 'Conceptual Blockbusting: a guide to better ideas' by James Adams, an emeritus professor here at Stanford University. Amazon says: "... James Adams's unique approach to generating ideas and solving problems has captivated, inspired, and guided thousands of people from all walks of life. Now, twenty-five years after its original publication, Conceptual Blockbusting has never been more relevant, powerful, or fresh. Integrating insights from the worlds of psychology, engineering, management, art, and philosophy, Adams identifies the key blocks (perceptual, emotional, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and expressive) that prevent us from realizing the full potential of our fertile minds. Employing unconventional exercises and other interactive elements, Adams shows individuals, teams, and organizations how to overcome these blocks, embrace alternative ways of thinking about complex problems, and celebrate the joy of creativity..."

Resistance and Persuasion

So, this is one book I have been meaning to look into for a while. Teaching might be, to some extent, about exploring and leveraging the resistance students present to new knowledge. I have never read nothing on the theme of resistance and maybe 'Resistance and Persuasion' by Eric Knowles and Jay Linn is something we can look into: "...This book explores persuasion by considering its antithesis: resistance. Resistance hounds persuasion the way friction frustrates motion. To accomplish the latter, you have to expect and, preferably, manage the former. It makes sense that those who desire to understand persuasion should also seek to understand the nature and operation of resistance to persuasion..."

We are meeting today!

Please join us for the first kick-off meeting on Wednesday, January 17 (today!) from 3:30-5pm in the lounge of the Asian American Activities Center (543 Lomita Dr., trailer on the corner of Santa Teresa Ave. and Lomita Dr.).